Stripy hat and yellow walls

Yesterday, Daughter 1 and I took Grandson and Granddaughter to the Botanics. It was sunny but chilly. There were interesting bumpy bits of path to stand on.

He wore his boots because there were occasional puddles.

There were signs of spring.

 There were interesting shadows.

And there was what has become the tradition of sitting on the little wall for a while, in sight of the car, regardless of the fact that my parking ticket is about to run out. At least I'd be able watch from a distance as a traffic warden descended on my vehicle to give me a fine.

What was Mr L doing meanwhile? you ask.

Well, he was not painting the kitchen. He'd been doing that for a few days and had progressed as far as applying colour to the walls. I don't know if you're the same, but I'm not good at judging whether a paint which looks just right when applied from a sample mini-pot on to a piece of paper will look equally good all over a large wall. It's not that I don't know the problem. The problem is that the colour looks much more intense on the wall and sometimes also - just - well - different. I know this and I still find it difficult.

The previous colour of the kitchen walls was pale lemony yellow. I fancied a bit of a change and flirted with samples of pale green but in the end, for various reasons not unconnected with the above, decided to play safe and chose a shade called Soft Cream. I not unnaturally expected this to be cream-coloured.

It was pink. Well, perhaps not strictly pink. But certainly pinkish cream. And since the curtains are white with yellow, green and blue, I did not want to introduce pink into the mix. So after painting one wall, Mr L stopped for further instructions.

(He's a good man. You can see why I've kept him in post for forty years. We both remember the time when he'd finished painting the sitting room (also yellow, coincidentally... or maybe not...) and I decided that it wasn't quite right. Yes, he repainted the whole room with hardly even a reproachful sigh.)

This was the point that we had reached yesterday when I went to collect Daughter 1 and the little ones. As we put the children's coats on, my gaze fell on Daughter 1's kitchen walls. Well, fancy that: they were the exact colour that I'd had in mind at first: very pale buttery yellow. And she remembered what paint it was, and it was still available.

Simple! Yes, yes, it would indeed have been even simpler if I'd thought of that in the first place. But he's done it now and it looks very nice.